Safety cracking

Appearing in the current Vanity Fair issue is a thoughtful, incisive piece which delves into the theme of perception and reality as applied to the United States airport security apparatus. Citing evidence from security expert Bruce Schneier, author Charles Mann concludes that US$1.1 trillion spent in the 10 year life span of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has had negligible effect in curtailing potential threats. Though far from comprehensively assessing all TSA practices, the analysis does address the inefficacy of using expensive processes and time-consuming checkpoints to target a few obscure methods with an unlikely chance of duplication. By making airports and airplanes harder targets, the focus of potential terrorists will shift elsewhere. The displacement argument is a winning objection to the 'pressure-ouch' strategy. Moreover, for those still keen on attacking air travel, their likely entry will be through special access gates rather than standard, passenger security checkpoints. 

 

As the article states, 'I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn’t go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people — airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). “Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs,” Schneier says. “They have high turnover. If you’re a serious plotter, don’t you think you could get one of those jobs?”' For those who are both lazy and inclined to mayhem, Schneier's comments provide a pretty good primer in abbreviated, crib-sheet form. Distinguishing between real security and 'security theater', the piece seems to echo the Franklinian maxim that one who trades off liberty for security deserves neither, and, in this case, one has gotten neither. However, does that not lead the fundamental point: how to behave coolly when things get really fucked up? 

 

Yes, preparing to avert future attacks is paramount for the thousands of cryptographers, field intelligence agents, computer programmers, and police as well as the practitioners of statecraft. Yes, vigilance, rather than the mood of blithe blindness to real foreign threats that seemed to permeate and reek through Federal officialdom for nearly a decade under Clinton and Bush, must not deviate. But what do you do at the instant of outrage? If one accepts the fairly flimsy premise that the United States was in a state of war from the point the first plane hit, then how did the television polemics by politicians rate when applied to the military touchstone? The theater in the aftermath permuted, over time, to 'security theater.' Classify both unequivocally as theater of the absurd. 

 

Yet, it is equally absurd to believe that cool reason will always win the day. So, perhaps the biggest challenge in the post-9/11 world - a loathsome expression on many levels - is to write the response rulebook. Chairman Mao Ze-Dong wrote a brilliant read, On Guerilla Warfare, which diagrammed the steps to successful insurgency. The United States military has several field manuals for different theater operations. So do police and fire departments as does the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The RAND Corporation, a think tank, took the time to publish a manual for individual response. So, why not have a cognate for the leadership? The principle applies beyond terrorist attacks, for its ramifications extend to any outrage. Granted, no two crises are the same - 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, collapse of financial institutions. 

 

Yet, though officials respond under uncertainty, it is under much less uncertainty than for everyone else. Because of that position of privilege, their actions broadly influence behavior. Hence, the need for a set of principles. The nation is past due for guidelines of conduct for public officials when people are genuinely scared. No blueprint can say with certainty when the time is right either to draw the brakes or to put the foot on the accelerator. Solely acting within the moment can be as damaging as ignoring the nature of the moment altogether and sticking stolidly to the play book. Such is an example of absolutism which fails to apprehend the context and consequence of reaction. So, in the continued absence of any basic guidelines, all anyone will be prepared for the next time something awfully frightening happens in America will be rash words and ill-conceived laws.